Proof of God

Most fathers disappear from history. Within a few generations even their names are forgotten.

Abraham is different.

Before he held any land, army, or throne, extraordinary claims were attached to his family. His descendants would be beyond counting. Twelve princes would come from Ishmael. A great nation would follow.

Those are not vague blessings. They produce names - Kedar, Nebaioth, Dumah, Tema, Massa, Midian, Dedan.

And the names refuse to disappear.

Assyrian kings campaign against them. A Babylonian emperor abandons his capital to live in one of their oases for ten years, and Babylon's own chronicle records the New Year festival cancelled in his absence. A Persian-era silver bowl in the Brooklyn Museum names a king of Qedar. A first-century Jewish historian explains Arab circumcision by reference to Ishmael. Tens of thousands of inscriptions survive in scripts that modern scholars named after the very towns Genesis assigns to Abraham's eastern sons.

PROOF OF GOD follows that trail - through cuneiform archives, desert epigraphy, the Hebrew prophets, and the Qur'an - and does something devotional books rarely do: it prints the evidence against itself. Where identifications are contested, the contest is shown. Where the record is partial, the gaps are counted. The search was for twelve names. It did not find twelve.

What remains after every honest subtraction is a family that history proved unable to lose.

Dr. Isa Ruhullah Brimah is a physician and a college professor of anatomy and physiology in New York, and the author of MISUNDERSTOOD: Jesus the Messiah, QADAR: Freedom Inside the Writing, Gratitude: The Silver Bullet, and Believe In Miracles: A Manual for Life.